


Two High

by fandomfrolics



Series: Musical Inspiration Fics [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 01:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14534043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomfrolics/pseuds/fandomfrolics
Summary: It’s months before he finally takes out the damn phone. Weeks more of staring at it, fighting between the urge to toss it off the roof and dialing that one number. Days of opening, closing, opening, closing, the clunk of the phone a new nervous tic to add to his array.He’s angry. God, he’s still so...he’s burning and bitter and tired and sometimes he’s a bit ashamed but the thing is, thethingis, Steve is a broken clock and he’s right about at least this one thing. They’re his family and he needs to know.





	Two High

**Author's Note:**

> This next writing practice fic contains Infinity War spoilers and features The Phone and That Damn Unread Message. Also takes place in a mild AU where that Tony/Pepper scene never happened. I’ve only seen the movie once so far and don’t have a camrip nor the awesome memory some of you seem to possess so some of the actual IW details might be off. Can be read as gen or pre-slash or even previous relationship if you want a little extra angsty undertone.
> 
> The song on shuffle that inspired this one was ‘Two High’ by Moon Taxi.

It’s months before he finally takes out the damn phone. Weeks more of staring at it, fighting between the urge to toss it off the roof and dialing that one number. Days of opening, closing, opening, closing, the clunk of the phone a new nervous tic to add to his array.

He’s angry. God, he’s still so...he’s burning and bitter and tired and sometimes he’s a bit ashamed but the thing is, the _thing_ is, Steve is a broken clock and he’s right about at least this one thing. They’re his family and he needs to know.

It’s been a long time since he’s taken this much effort to send a message, with the T9 dictionary and the stiff unrelenting buttons, and each tap tap tap is a release.

4 6 9 7 0

The word autocorrects _‘How’s’_ with an apostrophe and he pauses.

9 2 6 6 3 2

Her name isn’t in the pre-defined list and he presses to add it to the dictionary. He leaves the question unpunctuated and with a firm final press, sends the message off. He’s forgotten, with all his holograms and his talking AIs, how tactile long-distance communication could be.

It’s to his god-honest surprise that the message icon blinks at him the next morning, a giant envelope icon on that unnecessarily large screen on the front of the device.

_‘Wanda’s doing her best. How’s Rhodes?’_

And so back and forth they go, just one message sent a night and one received in the morning. Steve is an army man and knows the value of a clear, concise status update. It’s Tony who has to catch himself, who painstakingly types out a too-long message and has to hit that damn back key too many times. He doesn’t ask about Barnes and Steve doesn’t offer. It’s also a few weeks before he checks in on Wilson, coincidentally on the same day Rhodey finally completes a lap around the track on his own.

But Wanda, Nat, even Barton and that Lang guy, every day he’s fed a morsel of intel on each. It’s not like they’ll ever know he was asking.

_‘Tell them to take the deals,’_ he sends one day, with no clean segue from their ongoing conversation on Vision but he’s been puppeteering this thing for weeks now and it’s time for it to come to fruition.

_‘Thanks,’_ is all he gets back, nine hours and a sunrise later and he spends the rest of the day feeling just a little bit lighter.

There’s something about this device that feels out of their current reality. It’s the way he has to plug the thing into a wall charger every few nights, it’s the sole conversation in the inbox and the near-empty phone book. The phone feels ephemeral, almost otherworldly. It’s a portal into another time and space, one in which Steve didn’t leave him bleeding out on the floor and Tony didn’t unwittingly aid and abet the jailing of half his team. It’s a world where they can say all the things they’d never say, not to the people around them and certainly never to each other’s faces.

_'I told Wanda we can’t save everybody but I don’t know how to tell her that I never stop seeing their faces,’_ Steve confesses one morning.

_‘Some nights, especially when it’s clear out, I can’t even bear to look up at the sky,’_ Tony types back from his bed that night, curtains carefully drawn over the floor-to-ceiling windows that line his bedroom.

_‘I miss Peggy and my mom and the Bucky I used to know. Sometimes I wish they’d never pulled me out of the ice.’_

_‘I don’t know how to make it work with Pepper,’_ he sends after one too many glasses of scotch. _‘I can’t fix this and it’s not fair’_ and that one hurts in too many ways to count.

_‘I’m growing a beard. It itches.’_

_‘I’ve discovered I like tea almost as much as coffee. (Try coconut oil, it helps with the itching)’_

_‘I want to remember what happiness feels like.’_

_‘I think I’ve always wanted to have a big family. Tons of kids.’_

He immediately regrets sharing that last thought when the the Spider-kid goes down and Tony, thousands of miles away in India, has the taste of dirty water in the back of his throat and the smell of a dank cave filling his nostrils.

_‘I think I’d be bad with kids,’_ is Steve’s absurd reply. ‘ _You’d be good. You’re good with kids.’_

It’s ridiculous, a ridiculous thing to say but somehow it sticks in his ears, gives him a little warmth beneath his skin when he contacts the FBI and tries his best to keep the kid out of danger.

_‘I don’t want to turn out like my dad.’_

_‘You could never_.’ The words are said to be reassuring but they sting through his chest and he pivots sharply away from any further conversation about his parents to this man.

He doesn’t tell Steve about inviting the kid to the compound. He knows what he’s doing, collecting people and trying to rebuild something that should never have been broken. He knows he’s trying to do it with all the wrong pieces.

_‘I’m scared the fight will never end,’_ he says, months of messages both weighty and mundane flown by.

_‘I’m scared that it will.’_ comes the reply and Tony stares and stares and thinks about loss and grief and what it means to have a home.

_‘I miss you. Come home’_ he types and deletes and types and deletes and each one takes him seconds too long, the same pattern executed over and over again. A part of his brain starts trying to dissect the code somehow, confused at this recitation of numbers that has no theorem behind it.

One last time he types and starts to delete, but he pauses this time, leaving the first half of the message intact. He sends it, tosses the phone on the bedside table and with a tug of his blankets, turns his back on the damn thing.

The icon is there in the morning, blinking up at him clear as ever even through his sleep-weighted eyes. For the first time in years, he doesn’t open it.

For all that they’ve shared, the secret desires and grim fears, they’d been careful to stay away from this - the concept of them, the possibility of reconciliation. He suddenly finds himself afraid of what Steve has to say.

It all becomes moot a few hours later when he finds himself in a strange mansion with a guy who does magic and a Bruce, who’s staring at him askance and needing him to make the call. The phone’s already in his hand and there it is, that icon, just glaring at him and waiting.

“We’re not on speaking terms,” he says. This isn’t speaking. This is some desperate attempt at catharsis from two men who don’t deserve it. It’s ping-ponging from denial to anger, taking a right-turn at bargaining and slowing to a muddy crawl through depression. They’ve fucked everything up, the both of them, and for all that they’ve said there’s so much more they didn’t and this can’t be it. This can’t be the first conversation they have.

There’s a rumble in the ground. A flicker in Strange’s hair catches his eye and just like that the decision is taken out of his hands.

The phone slides neatly back into its spot, message unread, call unmade.


End file.
